phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

. A clipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often also reduced.

Examples

Dutch

Particularly in Netherlands

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare the phoneme in 'rabbit' and 'king'. In weak forms of words, e.g. and , the vowel is frequently centralized: (the latter approaching ''veur'', a dialectal form found in Low Saxon and Limburgish dialects), though further reduction to or is possible in rapid colloquial speech.

English

Many dialects of English (such as Australian English,

General American English General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...

Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geog ...

, South African English and Standard Canadian English) have two types of non-phonemic clipping: pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping. The first type occurs in a

stressed syllable In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...

before a fortis consonant, so that e.g. ''bet'' has a vowel that is shorter than the one in ''bed'' . Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in ''keychain'' ) are not affected by this rule. Rhythmic clipping occurs in polysyllabic words. The more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are and so the first vowel of ''readership'' is shorter than in ''reader'', which, in turn, is shorter than in ''read''. Clipping with vowel reduction also occurs in many unstressed syllables. Because of the variability of vowel length, the diacritic is sometimes omitted in IPA transcriptions of English and so words such as ''dawn'' or ''lead'' are transcribed as and , instead of the more usual and . Neither type of transcription is more correct, as both convey exactly the same information, but transcription systems that use the length mark make it more clear whether a vowel is checked or free. Compare the length of the RP vowel in the word ''not'' as opposed to the corresponding in Canadian English, which is typically longer (like RP ) because Canadian is a free vowel (checked is very rare in North America, as it relies on a three-way distinction between , and ) and so can also be transcribed as . The Scottish vowel length rule is used instead of those rules in Scotland and sometimes also in Northern Ireland.

Serbo-Croatian

Many speakers of

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...

from Croatia and Serbia pronounce historical unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions (such as genitive plural endings). Therefore, the name is pronounced , rather than .

References

Bibliography